The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

How to be a Productivity Ninja: Worry Less, Achieve More and Love What You Do

In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don't cut it when it comes to overflowing inboxes, ever-expanding to-do lists and endless pointless meetings. Thankfully there is a better way: the way of the productivity ninja. Using techniques including ruthlessness, mindfulness, Zenlike calm and stealth and camouflage, you will get your inbox down to zero, make the most of your attention, beat procrastination and learn to work smarter, not harder.

Work Without Walls: An Executive's Guide to Attention Management, Productivity, and the Future of Work

According to Maura Thomas in Work Without Walls, "(in the knowledge economy,) the most important individual and corporate resources are neither time nor money, but body and mind." Her research and 20+ years of experience in the productivity field confirm that relationships and productivity suffer when people are stressed, and that greater employee happiness creates success and productivity, and is essential to deliver great customer experiences.

Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Since taking over TED in the early 2000s, Chris Anderson has shown how carefully crafted short talks can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience's worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.

Infectious: How to Connect Deeply and Unleash the Energetic Leader Within

Technology has transformed the way we communicate. We send and receive more and more emails every day. We text. We tweet. We have reduced our communications down to efficient sound bites - and at the same time, many of us seem to know less and less about how to connect. Deeply, profoundly connect.

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre

Mini Farming describes a holistic approach to small-area farming that will show you how to produce 85 percent of an average family's food on just a quarter acre - and earn $10,000 in cash annually while spending less than half the time that an ordinary job would require.

Open

A collection of hactivists, hobbyists, forum-users, and maverick leaders are leading a quiet but unstoppable revolution. They are sharing everything they know, and turning knowledge into action in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Driven by technology, and shaped by common values, going open has transformed the way we live. It's not so much a question of if our workplaces, schools, and colleges go open, but when.

Publisher's Summary

Peter Cappelli confronts the myth of the skills gap and provides an actionable path forward to put people back to work.

Even in a time of perilously high unemployment, companies contend that they cannot find the employees they need. Pointing to a skills gap, employers argue applicants are simply not qualified; schools aren't preparing students for jobs; the government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants; and even when the match is right, prospective employees won't accept jobs at the wages offered.

In this powerful audiobook, Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, debunks the arguments and exposes the real reasons good people can't get hired. Drawing on jobs data, anecdotes from all sides of the employer-employee divide, and interviews with jobs professionals, he explores the paradoxical forces bearing down on the American workplace and lays out solutions that can help us break through what has become a crippling employer-employee stand-off.

Among the questions he confronts: Is there really a skills gap? To what extent is the hiring process being held hostage by automated software that can crunch thousands of applications an hour? What kind of training could best bridge the gap between employer expectations and applicant realities, and who should foot the bill for it? Are schools really at fault?

Named one of HR Magazine's Top 20 Most Influential Thinkers of 2011, Cappelli not only changes the way we think about hiring but points the way forward to rev America's job engine again.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Why Good People Can't Get Jobs?

The book made me think more about why young graduates need to look for jobs with companies that will invest in them through CPD programmes. Companies need to see the dividend in employee CPD training, even if only plan to employ those staff for short fixed term contracts. Do employees today want the same job for life? Do employers want the same employees for life? No they don't. So how do employers and employees create a win win? Listen to this book and find out.

What does Don Hagen bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?

The book is a good listen on your daily commute.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?